Stripe and Advent International in talks to take PayPal private

The $53.4B headline offer is at 1.6x FY2025 revenue against a company that peaked at a $356B market cap in July 2021 — meaning the company is worth a fraction of what it was, having shed roughly $320B from its pandemic peak, and PayPal's board already rejected the initial July offer as insufficient, so the final print will be north of $60.50/share. Venmo fills a specific gap for Stripe: Stripe has strong merchant-facing infrastructure but limited visibility at the consumer checkout stage, and its Link wallet remains far smaller than PayPal and Venmo — this is not an adjacent-vertical bet but a direct buy of the consumer-side capability Stripe has never built; Braintree adds roughly $700B in processing volume, and the combined consumer network reaches ~231 million monthly active users and ~90% of online merchants, which would close the one-sided nature of Stripe's TPV in a single move rather than years of organic wallet growth. Advent's pattern here is consistent: it took Nuvei private in 2024 at $6.3B at a 56% premium to its pre-leak price — payments take-privates at distressed-to-fair valuations are squarely in Advent's lane, and its role here as the PE equity backstop alongside a ~$17B equity contribution shared with Block and ~$50B in committed bank financing mirrors that playbook at 8x the size. Cantor's sum-of-the-parts analysis pegged PayPal closer to $70/share, and with roughly $6B in annual free cash flow, the board has real cover to keep pushing — the live question is whether Stripe will bridge from ~$60.50 to the mid-$70s or walk, and whether antitrust around two large payment processors combining forces a partial deal (Braintree only) that makes the financial case look very different.

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